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“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”

“... to assert the same of an ordinary power station on the grounds that it generates half a billion watts of electricity, or, per contra, that a dam must be perfectly safe because it weighs a million tons and is just sitting quietly on Mother Earth. I do not say that the problems of risk assessment and accident avoidance are not peculiarly difficult in nuclear ...”

“... anatomically perplexing ‘The wicked backslide from the very womb’ (58). But fortunately, as Edward Dahlberg once remarked, ‘there are many psalms that even the droning of a priest cannot kill.’ As one reads along, the suspicion grows that perhaps this book is not about the poetry at all, but about the commentary. Usually half, and sometimes more, of ...”

“... essay in appreciation. He also did some delegation in order to complete the work. The life of Edward Young was written by Herbert Croft, who was more diligent than his master in unearthing facts, but whose pastiche of the Johnsonian style painfully illustrates how hard that style is to emulate. Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of ...”

“... interests of free speech his critics should stop trying to sniff out moral wrongdoing. But when Edward Moxon pulled the book, Swinburne stood firm. ‘To alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except ...”

“... Moonie influence. William Simon, who had been one of Reagan’s chief fund-raisers in 1980, Jim Watts, Reagan’s Interior Secretary, and the Presidential counsellor, Claire Booth Luce, all agreed to accept honorific positions with the Times, which rapidly became the preferred house magazine of the Reagan Administration. The President himself has frequently ...”

“... and Bazalgette’s death in 1891. Individual tunnels were named after members of the royal family. Edward, prince of Wales, and a train of courtiers, bishops and stakeholders in attendance, lifted their champagne flutes at the opening ceremony at Crossness. The pumping station was described as a Valhalla, with avenues of columns, lights and arches spreading in ...”

“... history or memory in paint, and the general sense of trivial pursuit that infests our culture. In Edward Hopper’s work Hughes praises ‘patient, lucid development; the transcendence of mere talent; richness and density of meaning; and a deep sense of moral dignity in the artist’s refraction of his own culture’. Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the ...”

“... and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised or intended when they put Britain’s state-owned electricity industry ...”

“... but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid Vicious in the ...”